learning to love it (or at least not loathe it)

One of the things I tell new moms all the time is that they have to make time for the things they want to do. When it comes to finding or making time for yourself, you have to be your own best advocate and schedule it in with the same commitment you give everyone else.

That said, moms — like all adults, except perhaps the independently wealthy — have to do a lot of things we don’t love. I’m all about being a relaxed mama, but I’ve got standards, and feeding the kids Chef Boyardee every night just to give myself more Twitter time wouldn’t feel good, either.

The good news is that there are ways to squeeze more enjoyment out of things we don’t particularly enjoy. For example, I’ve found a few ways to make prepping healthy meals a little more fun:

• Cook with a friend. At-home moms can hook up with another at-home mom in the afternoon, double a recipe, chat and cook together while the kids play. Then split up the results and head home with your meal—just pop in the oven to re-heat. Bonus points if you watched each other’s kids to do the grocery shopping—or did it together, sans kids, while the kids stayed home with Dad.
  

• Cook with your co-parent. Wait until you’re both home in the evening, then sit in the kitchen together and chat while you make food. It might mean pushing dinner back an hour or two, but the benefits—time with your spouse, not having to do everything yourself – are well worth it.

• Use a meal prep service. Have you seen these? You pay a fee, go to a commercial kitchen and use their ingredients and tools to create meals (the service provides the menu, recipes and instruction), then package them up and take them home. They’re the kind of meals that can be refrigerated or frozen and re-heated later. Here’s an example of one such service; try Googling “meal prep service” and your town and see what comes up. https://dinnerbydesignkitchen.com/index.aspx
  

• Ever seen Food Network’s “Next Food Network Star”? One of the things contestants on this show are supposed to do is create a ‘culinary point of view’. I find that focusing on my culinary point of view helps me trim down to what’s essential to me and keeps me from spending too much time doing things I find really unrewarding. My culinary point of view is “whole, fresh, and simple.” That means I stay away from processed foods as much as I can and go for recipes heavy on fresh ingredients…and that’s all I expect of myself. I purposely stay away from complicated recipes and limit the number of ingredients I’ll cook with, because I’ve learned that trying to create culinary masterpieces for my (mostly ungrateful) family is the fast track to frustration: right now, I just don’t enjoy the adventure enough.
  

What about you? What tricks have you found to make something you “have” to do a bit more fun or a lot less frustrating?